Project: The Orphanage
| Project Started: |
21st February, 2008 |
Last Update: |
27th May, 2009 |
| Project Owner: |
 ben mercer |
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| Project Type: |
Tactical shooter/Survival horror |
Project Progress: |
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| Project Overview |
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The Orphanage is the story of operator codename Xiphos, a SAS supercommando with unprecidented combat ability and an old secret.
The operator's signifcance as a deadly force was realised during Operation Hammer in the middle east, where he played a major role in bringing down an entire terrorist faction. The children of Azhar were feared for their brutality, killing indiscriminately torturing, and carrying out devastating bombing attacks to accomplish their objective of empowering their eponymous leader, whom they believed to be the human incarnation of god.
Now the operator has been dispatched to north russia for a covert mission concerning the reappearance of disgraced and long presumed dead biochemist Adam Cornwell, who is apparently in the company of a private army of armour clad soldiers.
And there is something else; the evil that lies beneath the orphanage...
Features
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-Advanced visual effects and logarithmic dynamic lighting, time of day lighting
-Intelligent and perceptive AI that will work as a team to fight the player
-Varied and detailed weapons, customisable; add supressors, grenade launchers and laser sights to your weapons
-Weapon penetration engine; bullets can penetrate through thin walls or weak materials
-Horrific blood and gore effects
-Detailed physics and world interactivity
-Enemies that evolve to counter your strategies
-Difficulty ranging from beginner level to "elite realistic" where weapon damage is realistic and enemies are highly skilled
Project Development
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I guess a few people are probably wondering what happened to this game... well sorry folks, but I went to uni. However I am still working one the game, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Since the demo, the engine has recieved numerous improvements, including a physics engine, a new weapon modification interface, a new logarithmic lighting algorithm.
Everything now reacts much more in the way you would expect in the real world. With the new localised material mapping metal surfacing will chink and spark when shot at whilst wooden surfaces will send splinters flying into the air. Weak surfaces can be pentrated by bullets which forces the player to discrimnate between cover and concealment. Some surfaces can be completely destructable allowing you to blast gaping holes through walls etc.
One small improvement that I'm quite proud of is the RPG launcher. Originally it was a fairly unspectacular rocket which illuminated it's surroundings and gibbed enemies on impact. Now when the rocket is fired, a plume of fire erupts from the rear of the launcher (which can set fire to people, which is hilarious), and the rocket soars out, leaving a trail of vapour behind it.
The new improvements arose when I decided to abandon the hope of using hardware acceleration as a speed booster, so i needed to carry out heavy optimisations to the engine. What? Optimisations like adding a physics engine? Weapon penetration? Localised materials? Well yeah I know it sounds counter intuitive, but the new features are very efficient, and have very little effect on the running speed of the game, whereas the optimisations have really helped.
The release of this game will be "when it's done" but I am thinking it will probably take another 6 months to get to alpha, then a further 2 months for testing and bugfixing. Hopefully people will not condemn it as vapourware, but if they do they will be proven wrong! I might post a tech demo of the new features at some point.
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Actually awesome
By: NaitorStudios
On: 8th Jul 20, 08/07/2020 19:09:39
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YAY!
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Posted 27th May 09, by ben mercer
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5 Comments
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I am in the middle of my 2nd year exams for my engineering degree, and as such should not be working on games let alone writing devlogs about them!
Today however I had a bit of a eureka moment. Dev on this game has been more or less at a standstill for the last month or so because of the large volume of uni work and an annoying crash that seemed to be ruining the games chances.
The new pathfinding system was all very well and good, but every time a soldier needed to move to a new position, there was a small chance the game would freeze- which obviously kills the game a bit. This is due to some wonky coding in the advanced path movement object, but today I managed to devise a workaround. And now it works fine. YAY!
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An annoying conclusion
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Posted 3rd Apr 09, by ben mercer
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5 Comments
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This is a classic case of a game's scope expanding beyond what the original code is capable of. To cut a long story short, I'm re-writing the AI, yep the soldier AI. Sounds like a right blow and it feels like one too but I came to the annoying conclusion that it was the only feasable way to proceed.
I'll explain my reasoning. The soldier AI has never been rewritten completely; ever since the very first (and very crappy) version of the game I demoed on TDC the fundamental code of the soldier AI has been the same. Since then more and more features have been bolted on and the code slowly became horribly inefficient and horrible to maintain. When I started re-writing the monster AI, I realised the monsters could do most of the stuff the soldiers can, and in better and more reliable ways- and the code is so much more compact and well organised. It was at this point the idea of rewriting crossed my mind. I was having a fight with some soldiers just to try and make up my mind and the fact that more than about 3 soldiers fighting caused slowdown swayed me... in my mind that is just not acceptable because in itself it limits the scope of the game.
Right, thats the bad news done with. The good news is that I am well into the writing of the new AI codebase. I have all of their behaviours specified- in many cases its just writing what I wrote before in a more organised fashion. There is one key difference however, and that is pathfinding. In the old AI code, soldiers gave the illusion of spatial awareness by moving to and from pre defined cover points- which in most cases worked quite well, but in cramped indoor spaces they often had trouble pursuing the player. With the new pathfinding system the AI find their way around any environment with no trouble at all- they seem so much smarter already. The pathfinding system which is based around Alien's advanced path movement object (not APFO which requires the NET update) also supports moving to cover and a range of other manouvers inherantly. The AI can now not only follow patrol paths in their unaware state, but also move around the map to objectives. For example a squad can move across the map to a certain location and set up patrols there. When they are traversing the map they don't just walk there, they properly move from to cover to cover, watching each other's backs as they go.
I'll also feel a lot better when I release the open source because I was ashamed of the old soldier AI code! People always said it was impressive and I always thought "if only they knew how bad it looked under the hood..."
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Monsters! (new video)
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Posted 28th Feb 09, by ben mercer
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2 Comments
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Hello!
The monster (not soldier) AI has been a matter of extreme difficulty to me throughout this project; I have literally re-written it from the ground up about five times. The point is I want these monsters be so disturbing, so horrifying that they will scare people out of their wits! It is always dissapointing when you play a game (ahem FarCry) that has intelligent soldier AI and then you get to the bit with monsters and they are underwhelming creatures with "run at you screaming" AI.
One small but very important part of a free roaming monster AI is its navigation around the level. Using bouncing ball movement just doesn't cut it for enclosed spaces- it makes it very unlikely that monsters will enter a doorway for example because they are more likely to just bounce off the wall next to it.
So I have implemented a node based nav system which directs the monsters around the level in a random but guided fashion. This means that monsters have much more freedom to move around the level and are hence the player never knows where he might cross paths with one.
Here's a link to a video demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pw3enJm-aA
The monsters don't actually look like red blobs- I'm going to keep the monster's appearance and key aspects of their behaviour strictly under wraps- no screenshots or anything! This is so people won't know whats coming when they play the game. Yeah I 've shown screenies of the spiders... but everyone knows what a spider looks like.
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